


at the river's edge

by bloomerie



Series: buttercup [4]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bisexual Jaskier | Dandelion, Complicated Relationships, F/F, F/M, Female Jaskier | Dandelion, Folklore, Found Family, Gen, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, and for a good amount of this to have jaskier injured, expect contemplation on love and sex, which is oddly not the point of the story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:47:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22614319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloomerie/pseuds/bloomerie
Summary: Jaskier's concept of family has never been conventional. Over the years, she makes one for herself.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: buttercup [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599100
Comments: 48
Kudos: 715





	at the river's edge

It’s the wrong side of spring when the no-name girl enters a copse of rowans in northern Redania to discover the not-woman perched at the stream’s edge. 

At the sight, the girl freezes and terror steals the breath from her lungs, but the not-woman twists to look at her before she can flee. “Hello,” says the water spirit in a voice like rough breeze, and calls the girl “granddaughter” with a laugh laced into each syllable. When she grins, her blue lips don’t part so much split her face, revealing not teeth, but two rows of jagged stone. Her eyes are a fish’s eyes; her skin that of a drowned corpse. She sits nude with her legs dangling in the water, her nakedness hidden by the thick waterside reeds that are her hair. With her trout eyes and pebbled smile, she surveys the girl who wants to run and says, “Come.”

So the girl goes.

In Kerack, they called a green-haired water spirit like this a boginka. It’s a boginka’s general prerogative to steal wayward travelers and misbehaving children and lustful men beneath their waters, then eat them. But the girl was a janner child, once, born living off the sea, off the water, and so she knows about the importance of respect. When she’s close, but not close enough to touch, she dips a hand into the leather pouch hanging against her hip, and says, “All I can offer you a shared meal and a song, Grandmother, if it pleases you,” as she removes her single loaf of bread.

Those trout eyes narrow even as she splits the loaf in two. A gust of wind swirls the last of winter’s decayed foliage around her ankles, so mud and damp leaf rot stick to her skin. The air is saturated with the portent of afternoon rainfall and the air chilled despite the persistent sunlight sneaking through the overcast. It weighs on her, this wetness, heavier than the stolen lute hanging on her back. Her breath rattles in her chest. She’s in no position to run from green-haired water spirits, weak as she is from the first shakes of fever and endless exhaustion. Desperate, she inches closer into arm’s reach, hand outstretched with half the loaf gripped loosely in her palm. 

When the boginka snatches it from her, their fingers touch. Long after the contact breaks, the cold feeling of the creature’s skin stays settled beneath the girl’s. 

Still wary, the girl takes a seat on the grassy waterside beside the spirit, her legs folded beneath her skirts. They share their meal in silence, the only sounds the blue jay calls and the wind rattling the still bare branches. The stream is just a ribbon cutting through the underbrush, moving lazily between its raised rock sides. Occasionally the girl disrupts her eating to sip at her waterskin, as thirsty as she is hungry after hours of wandering the road. She doesn’t finish her half of the loaf, slipping the butt of it back into her leather pouch, before she does as she promised, and sings the boginka an old sea shanty from Morzawa. 

The boginka smiles again, but slower. “You are a curious thing,” she says, as though musing this. “Venture north and east, into the darker wood. You will find a healer.”

“I don’t need a healer,” the girl says as she undoes the cap to her waterskin. Already there’s fluid in her lungs and a fever set in her limbs, but she pretends stubbornly that this is only the damp cold. “Just more to drink.”

As she reaches to dip the waterskin into the stream, leaning forward as she does, the boginka’s hand shoots out again to wrap her hand around the girl’s wrist. “Do not touch the water,” she says, voice a sudden hiss. “They run deep and the current swift. Fall, and no one will find you.”

“There’s no one to look for me,” the girl says, fatigued in a way that leaves even her bones aching. Those trout eyes search her face, scruitising, before the cadaverous hand relinquishes her wrist. 

Without another word, the water spirit slinks into the stream, becoming one with the unseen current as though she were never there at all. After a moment’s hesitation, the girl plunges her arm into the water, gripping on the grass to steady herself, and stays ashore. 

Yennefer realises that she  _ wants  _ Geralt’s silly travel companion one early autumn afternoon in the wilds of Velen. It’s not a planned meeting—they find each accidentally an hour from the region’s capital, where she met Sabrina to share news about the Chapter’s latest poor decision-making. There, she hears a familiar pained scream travel to the road from the trees.

“This is where I leave you,” she tells Sabrina in one long sigh. Her friend is en route to Oxenfurt and Yennefer to a local lord’s keep at the behest of the lady, who promised more than decent pay to rid herself of an unwanted problem, so they decided to travel together to the nearest village before separating.

“What?” Sabrina says, reining her horse to stop as Yennefer does. Her eyes flit past her to the wood, to the direction of the scream. They, like her dress, are the same colour as the autumn sky. “That didn’t sound good. I’ll come with you.” 

Again, Yennefer sighs. “It’s fine,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear as the wind tries to tease it across her face. “I recognise it.”

Raising a brow, Sabrina says, “Oh?” but Yennefer declines offering an explanation. There are rumours of her and Geralt, as expected, but few mages bother to pay humans like Jaskier any mind beyond her courtly performances. 

They separate with a short farewell and a promise to see each other sometime in the realm of soon. Clicking her heels, Yennefer leaves the road for the trees, and follows a twisted ridge to a gully cut through with a bubbling creek. As sure-footed as Dahlia, her mare, is, the downward trek is one constructed of uneven dips hidden in long weeds and longer grass and loose rocks, forcing her to descend slowly. Worse yet, despite the trees, the formation of the rocks made the sound echo, so she rides nearly thirty minutes before she rounds a bend between a cliff and the creek to discover the decapitated corpse of a bruxa at her mare’s feet.

A few yards away, seated together on a long rock by the creek, are Geralt and Jask. She sits with her back to him, bent forward with her her dress shoved down to her hips to reveal claw marks stretching from her shoulder to waist perfectly parallel to her spine. He has one hand flat on the uninjured side, and in the other, he holds a threaded needle poised to the base of the first slash, too deep in concentration to notice Yennefer’s entrance. 

_ What a shame _ , she thinks almost idly as she swings down from her saddle,  _ to mar such perfect skin. _

“Stop,” she says, managing to catch them just before he pierces the needle into Jask’s back. “No need to damage the girl more than necessary, Geralt.” 

“Yen?” he says, turning his head in her direction, but not moving. Jaskier briefly glances her way through her hair, then sinks forward further, torso flat against her legs. “What? What are you doing here?” 

“Something more enjoyable than killing vampires,” Yennefer answers, walking Dahlia past the corpse to where their horses wait, breathing noisily and stamping in place in agitation. “How did you let this happen, Geralt?” she adds, and doesn’t care much that she sounds as though she’s chiding a child.

Sitting straighter, clearly offended, he says, “This isn’t a contract. We didn’t know a bruxa was going to be in the fucking woods.”

“Can someone do something?” Jaskier asks before Yennefer can say anything else. “Please? It hurts. Like, a lot.  _ Really  _ a lot. Fuck.” 

As she ties her mare’s reins to the bough of a tree growing from the cliff face beside Roach, Geralt stands, and walks to the edge of the stream. “Sit straight, Jask,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest. The breeze shifts the warm-coloured leaves above, drifting shadows across his face that exaggerate his scars. 

Jask does as told, though she cringes at the movement. Blood gushes freely from lacerations, streaming thick and red to pool in her tucked down dress. Her arms twitch, as if she also means to fold them in order to cover her nonexistent modesty from Yennefer when she hadn’t from Geralt, but stops with an undignified squeak. Abruptly, Yennefer realises that this is the first time she’s ever seen the girl undressed, even by half, and that she’s not such a little girl anymore. 

It’s likely not appropriate to acknowledge beauty and newfound womanhood while Jask is pained and bleeding, but Yennefer has never pretended to be good. 

When she claims Geralt’s unoccupied seat on the damp, lichen-scaled stone, he doesn’t turn his back, watching them warily. “The bruxa tore the muscles,” he says as she raises her hands, as though she can’t see that herself. 

The sparked realisation dies at the sight of the gore. In one slash, the bruxa ripped Jaskier so deeply that Yennefer sees her ribs, the yellow-white of the bone slicked from broken sinew and blood. There’s more splattered across her skin and in her plaited hair, which Geralt must have pushed over her shoulder for her. Her whole body quivers, but she doesn’t make a sound until Yennefer lays a hand on her. Though Jask may not be a girl anymore, she’s still fine-boned with a narrow frame that makes the extent of damage appear all the larger. 

When Yennefer initiates the magicked healing process, Jaskier screams, the sound reverberating through the gully so the sunlit air loses its sweetness to the pain. She tries to slump forward, but Yennefer catches her around the waist, holding her upright so the muscles and skin stitch together properly. Blood soaks her clothes, adhering to her skin, but she can fix both their dresses with more ease than she fix the human body. 

It would be a shame if she hadn’t found them. Wounds like this leave damnable scars on bodies far less enchanting than Jaskier’s. 

“You’re lucky I’m here,” she says, tipping her head to glance at Geralt, whose body is tense and his jaw clenched from the repressed need to save his darling damsel. “A row of stitches wouldn’t have done much to fix an injury like this. You need to be careful with her, Geralt.” 

“I didn’t know,” he says, snapping out the words. He breathes out, hard, and adds, “There are healers in Gros Velen.” 

That’s true enough, so she concedes. Jaskier falls more heavily against her, far too light. She has a scar on her stomach, one less distracting than what this would have left. Teeth marks from something small and sharp. They’re not quite faded enough to be old. It’s no wonder that she’s so comfortable having her dress hiked down around her waist in front of him when clearly, he’s bandaged her before. 

Just as idly, Yennefer wonders how long it’s been since he’s wanted Jask, too. 

Eventually even shock isn’t enough to keep her awake, and she swoons with all the grace of any high class maiden. Yennefer maneuvers her onto the grass, laying her onto her side so the injury can continue healing unhindered. “She never will find a nobleman to marry,” she says as she stands, turning to face Geralt, “will she?” 

He makes a noise halfway between a snort and a laugh. “She’d sooner die from a bruxa.” 

“That’s not such a shame,” Yennefer says. “She deserves better entertainment than some dull husband.” 

For now, she isn’t explicit, and Geralt does little more than stare at the other woman’s healing back, but the almost-acknowledgement seems a step in the newly desired direction regardless. 

Inside a dusty, deserted croft sixteen miles from any other dwelling, Geralt wakes at midday and sees a vision of domesticity for the first time since his mother left him to his fate.

He stands in the bedroom’s doorless entranceway, its heavy curtain pushing against his throbbing side, and takes in the sight of Jaskier balanced on the edge of a rickety chair in nothing but her shift, one leg stretching out behind her and her arm extended above her to grab a jar of dried herbs from the top of the cupboards. Through the window across the oblong room comes streaks of cold sunlight that outline her body in a shimmering halo. She’s humming a tune he recognises, though he can’t place the words. Flatbread and a dish of raspberry jam wait on the counter near her knee on a plate, a knife resting on the edge, and above the fire in the lit oven, a kettle boils.

Perhaps it’s the last vestiges of fevered sleep, or perhaps a remembrance of a feeling he refuses to name, but the scene leaves him with a deep-set ache worse than the one in his head. With it is a surge of guilt, but he shoves those both down, down, down until it’s though they were never there at all.

Once she succeeds in taking the jar, and sets both feet firmly on the chair, it seems safe enough to speak with the risk of her falling. “You could have waited for me,” he says, and represses a smile when she spins to face him, brows shot up in shock and a hand over her heart. 

Flushing all the way to her ears, she says, “But it’s  _ for  _ you. I recognised the leaves from down here. Black tea.”

The kettle whistles so shrilly that he flinches. With an “oh!” she hops from the chair, leaving it to rock on its unsteady legs, and sets the jar beside two mugs made of the same wood. Hemlock, he assumes. Most of the trees in this stretch of Bremervoor’s fen country are hemlock, so it’s the most likely, even if hemlock is shit for woodworking. 

“I don’t need breakfast in bed,” he says, amused, unmoving from the entranceway, as she wraps a tea towel tight around her hand to remove the kettle from the fire. Her braid, unadorned with flowers or ribbons, slides over her shoulder as she bends, and her loose shift rides up to the middle of her thighs.

That’s when he notices that the shift is translucent, so the sunlight striking through gives definition the shape of her body beneath it. There’s something about the obscurity that forces him to look away from her, eyes skipping from her half-visible body to the countertop as she says, “You still  _ deserve _ it sometimes, Geralt.” He’s seen her naked often enough—a side effect of living in close quarters and her general carelessness with her physical safety, showcased as recently as three months prior during a fight with a wraith in Oxenfurt—but this is different for a reason he can’t place. Invasive.

In answer, he hmms.

The floorboards creak as she moves across them, but halfheartedly, her footsteps too weightless to leave a lasting impression. “How are you feeling?” she asks, tone as light as her step, as she places the kettle on the countertop beside her. 

“Fine.”

“Liar.” She shakes tea leaves from the jar into the linen pouches dangling in the mugs without measuring the amount before adding the boiling water. Finally, he moves from the doorframe supporting him, ignoring his injuries’ protesting twinge, and inches closer. “You spent all night mumbling incoherently until I sang you a lullaby. I never knew an infection could turn a witcher so soft.”

There’s not much about the night he remembers, or even the day before, but the stitched, four-pronged wound on his side proves he fared badly in his fight against the vodyanoy terrorising the hamlet that commissioned him. “Did I kill it?” he asks, rather than admit his last clear memory is watching the creature burst from the water before he had the chance to draw his blade. 

“As always,” she says, and half-twirls to face him, plate in hand. “Sit down. Eat.” Once he’s settled to her standards on the only other, equally rickety chair in front of a small table with its own uneven legs, she goes on, “The corpse should still be back where we left it. I could help  _ you  _ get onto Roach just enough since you were doing about three quarters of the work, but a fully dead and slimy frog monster twice my size? My arms are uncooked potato noodles compared to yours. I’m not equipped for that type of heavy lifting.”

Again, he hmms. Later, he’ll return for the body. After he can walk without his muscles burning. After the ache in his head subsides. “And this place?” he says, gesturing vaguely at nothing with his jammed knife. It’s good, he discovers. So is the bread—the bread that’s fresh.

“The alderman mentioned everyone homesteading in the fens evacuated to the town,” she says, dragging the other chair back to the table to sit beside him. “Something had to be nearby, right? So I just let the horses pick a direction. It didn’t take that long. And you just dispatched the scary frog monster, so I figure the owners can spare some tea and jam and a little bit of flour, right? Oh! The tea.”

Then she’s on her feet again, scampering to the counter to finish readying the mugs, rambling on about how there’s no such thing as good tea in fen country, but it’s too cold outside to only have water, so they must make due. “I’ll need to stock up in Temeria,” she says, gliding over to place the steaming beverage beside his plate. “Or when we see Yen.” 

When Geralt swallows next, he tastes nothing, though he knows the bread is good, the bread that she made. The bread, the tea, the house—it’s creating an image that shouldn’t exist. Here is a cottage smelling of freshly baking bread and tea and woodsmoke where he spent the night on a straw-stuffed mattress with his horse whinnying in a sloppily built stable only to wake to find a fire in the oven burning to chase away winter’s chill, food already prepared, and Jask flitting around in nothing but her shift like this is where she’s always been. Witchers aren’t meant to succumb to fever, however temporarily, and witchers aren’t meant to have easy mornings in fen country with young women who complain about their tea. He feels disconnected, as though he’s watching the scene from the outside; they’re playacting at normality the both of them, the high born songstress from Oxenfurt and the witcher with more scars on his bodies than stories of how he got them in his head. 

To avoid speaking, he takes another bite of bread. She smiles at him, chin resting in her hand. In the sunlight coming through the window, her eyes are the colour of the season. She says, “We should wait another day, just to be certain you’re all right. If it turns out wolves have devoured the frog corpse in the meantime, I can still sweet talk the alderman into paying you what you’re owed.”

He should say no, insist they move on the moment he finishes, because even if his health won’t be perfect, it will be good enough. The words are there, lodged in his throat and ready to form, but he can feel the heat of her body where their knees nearly touch beneath the small, homemade table and the pull of the stitches tormenting his skin. This is a scene that shouldn’t exist. It’s a fever-vision brought into reality by something more nefarious than any spell. He knows this all, and knows what he should answer, but he has a memory of something that never happened, maybe, so he says instead, “Fine,” and leaves the matter be.

A week and a day after the winter solstice, Ciri creeps out of her room at dawn, careful to stay silent on the frigid stone floor, and knocks on the door to the room across from her own. The wood of it is a heavy maple, the sturdy type that makes even the lightest touch against into an almost-loud bang. The wait before it opens is excruciating. When it does, the person to greet her to Geralt, his eyes red-rimmed in exhaustion in a way she’s never seen before. 

Before she has more than a peak behind him—Yen in yesterday’s dress, her back against the wall, and Jask’s head in her lap, face hidden by her tangled hair—he slips out into the hall, and shuts the door just as quietly. “With me,” he says, rumbling, and steps past her so she has no choice but to follow him down the long stairs from the second tallest tower, through the labyrinth of drafty halls, and into the kitchen, where already a fire blazes in the oven that occupies most of the back wall. Vesimir and Eskel are at the large table, the former pouring tea for five and the latter breakfasting on black bread and butter. In front of the oven stands Lambert, hands outheld towards the flames and his shoulders hunched. Draped over a chair behind him is his travelling cloak, wet from melting snow.

When Ciri and Geralt enter, Eskel and Vesimir both stop, but Lambert doesn’t move. Bread halfway to his mouth, Eskel asks, “How is she?” It’s not quite the question she has eating at her, but it’s close enough. 

As Geralt sits in front of one mug, and she another, he answers, “She’ll survive.” His eyes are on the grooves in the table. Eskel looks at Vesimir, who looks at Eskel, both expressionless. 

Ciri’s leg jitters under the table. 

Eyes flicking to Lambert’s back, Geralt adds, “What did you find?”

The other witcher turns, and gestures to a jumble beside the oven that she hadn’t noticed. First she notes his dual-sheathed blades, then Jaskier’s worn saddle bag, and lastly, the lute. Its maple body is the palest in colour of the pile, but the rest shield the majority of it. With a jolt, she realises that what’s visible has a streak of black-red, dried blood.

“What happened?” she finally says, because she knows they won’t tell her otherwise. “Why wouldn’t you let me see her? Is Jaskier going to be all right? Why did Lambert have to get her things?” 

“She was attacked on the road, Ciri,” Geralt says, which is what she expected, but not what she wanted to hear. “Where, Lambert?”

“Yen is teaching me how to heal,” Ciri says before Lambert speaks. “I could have helped.” 

They ignore her. A log in the oven pops.

Focus entirely fixed on Geralt, he says, “The attack was five miles south.” Jerking his head to the pile, he continues, “Hadn’t made it more than another ten west.”

“Nilfgaard?” Vesimir says, so Lambert just snorts, as if to say  _ who else? _

When Eskel swears, no one tells him to watch his language.

Something slick and acidic and painful slides down Ciri’s spine at the confirmation. “Nilfgaard?” she repeats, a note too high. “All the way up here? They—Geralt, did Jask get hurt because that man was looking for me?”

“No.” He says it quick, sharp. In the glow from the oven, his catlike eyes flash. “Just deserters. Nilfgaard doesn’t know we’re here.”

Regardless of what he says, the others look away again, which means they don't know if that’s true. Again, her leg jumps. Already she learned that she doesn’t need to worry much about anyone injuring he or Yen, but she still noticed that they treat Jaskier _ differently.  _ Jaskier can be hurt. Jaskier has been hurt. If Nilfgaard were to attack anyone Ciri cares about, Jaskier is the easiest target.

Ciri’s lost one family to Nilfgaard already. She hadn’t prepared herself for the possibility to lose another.

Too fast for her to push him, Lambert says, “Eat, Ciri. We need to beat the snow.”

“I’m not training today,” she says, drawing everyone’s attention, so their eyes fall, for the first time since she entered the kitchen, on the simple dress Jask stitched her from one of her nightgowns last month. 

Lambert clears his throat. “Oh” is all he says, and turns back to the oven.

Two weeks before they should have reached Kaer Moren, Ciri bled for the first time. It was awful, embarrassing, and delayed them another six days. Once she began her training here, Yen and Jask thought up the Dress. Given the opportunity, Ciri would train regardless, discomfort aside, but the two _ insisted  _ she couldn’t, and made clothing a code so she doesn’t need to admit she’s...indisposed each and every time her body decides to remind her that she can never be a real witcher. That’s what they  _ do _ —all of them, Geralt and Yen and Jask. They take care of her, and in return, she can do nothing to help them.

Two hours after dawn, when she and Geralt are the only two left in the kitchen, Yen enters from the hall, but alone. “Good morning,” she says to Ciri first, and wraps one arm around her shoulders before pressing a kiss into her hair. She smells of the hot springs, freshly bathed.

“Where’s Jaskier?” she asks immediately, not allowing Geralt to speak first. Waiting all this time has been difficult; even Coen came and went, also asking how Jask is, the conversation held on repeat. 

Yen’s arm falls. She looks to Geralt first, then back again. “Still in bed,” she answers, and, haltingly, adds, “She...can’t make it down the stairs.” 

“What?” Geralt says. “Which—”

“The bruise on her ankle,” she says. “The muscle is torn. I don’t know how she walked on it for that long. I have a spell working on healing it, but it will take another few hours.” 

“Can I see her now?” Ciri says, voice more strained than she expected. “Please, Yen?”

Again, Yen inclines her head to Geralt, who raises a brow. Ciri  _ hates _ when they do that. Jaskier does it with them too, just as her grandparents did with each other. It’s a secret type of talk meant to exclude her, specifically. 

And again, she waits, but not happily.

After a moment, Geralt says, “She should eat.” 

Yen has Ciri boil water with magic, like she taught her last month, which they pour into the teapot to seep a handful of dried leaves. Ciri recognises them—rosemary and chamomile. It won’t taste the best, but the two prevent infection. Geralt gathers slices of bread and butter on a plate, enough for Jaskier and Yen both. Even if Ciri still doesn’t fully understand the relationship the three of them have, there’s something to it that leaves her sad, or jealous, or something else she can’t define.

“Lambert killed them, didn’t he? The soldiers who did it?” she says before they leave the protective warmth of the winter kitchen, clutching the mugs close to her chest. Objectively, she knows it already, but there’s an odd spark of new understanding when Geralt confirms it. Cautious, dreading the answer, she asks, “Did they—did they  _ hurt _ her?” 

By now, Ciri’s lived through the destruction of her home, and through months on the road on her own. Twelve is young, but not terribly. So when neither of them answer, when all they do is look at her and each other, that, for her, says enough. 

In a sorry inn in Tridam, a fortified town balanced on the banks of the Buina, Jaskier takes Ciri’s hand and, for the first time, uses the phrase “my daughter and I.” 

More specifically, she says, “My daughter and I need a room for two, please, Mistress.” She smiles when she says it. The innkeep stares at her with small, pale eyes that show no hint of distrust. There’s a trick in Jaskier’s smiles as surely as there’s a trick to her clear cut, perfect diction. This one says, “I am young and pretty and young pretty people never lie,” but also, “My placement on the social ladder is far too high for you to ever judge me.” Ciri stays very quiet, but her posture is as perfect as Jaskier’s diction and her gaze unwavering. 

The woman doesn’t ask for their opinion before she hands Jaskier the key to the inn’s best room. She gives the name Julia Pankratz, stealing the family name of Morzawa's lord.

“When is the soonest someone can draw a bath?” she asks as she accepts it. It’s been a fortnight since she and Ciri saw civilisation, and both their muscles and sense of personal hygiene require a long soak in water warmer than a river.

“My boy will be here to in an hour, there abouts,” the innkeep answers, pointedly looking only at Jaskier. “Howizit sound, an hour, m’lady?” She blinks, the movement slow. There’s a line of dust rimming the creases in her eyelids like badly applied cosmetics.

Again, Jaskier smiles. “An hour is more than doable, Mistress,” she says, and follows her to the room upstairs. 

It’s simple, and typical, with a door that jams made of the same wood as the walls and floor and furniture. Neither Jaskier nor Ciri speak while the innkeep lights a fire in the hearth, busying themselves with settling their saddlebags beside their respective beds. Ciri sits on hers, the one closest to the window. The mattress squeaks. Outside, a magpie swoops past, but its chatter is muffled through the glass. 

“Will you be wanting anything more, m’lady?” the innkeep asks once she’s done, a proper fire raging behind her, but Jaskier only says no, not yet, so the woman curtsies clumsily and hurries out the door.

Once her footsteps recede, Ciri stands and leans against the window frame, hugging herself. “Do people always assume that,” she says, focused on the going-ons on the streets below rather than turning to Jaskier, “when we stop in a town? Is that what you think?” 

As usual when they do when they need to enter a town, they inked her hair, so it’s darker than her usual white-blonde, but significantly more so than Jaskier’s light brown. “I doubt so on the days I perform,” she answers, uncertain about what the girl wants to hear, “but on days like today? More than likely. I am old enough to be your mother.” 

Ciri’s nose scrunches. “You don’t look it,” she says.

With a short laugh, Jaskier says, “That’s kind of you, but a lie. After the bath, would you like to find something to eat?”

“Do we have enough coin?”

“Yes.” 

Even if they’re on the last on their funds, they have enough for a meal and a night in a proper bed. How low they are on funds is the reason why they’re here; Geralt heard of a contract from a farmer ten miles back that called for the ridding of a bragherst pack that’s stalking the main road down to Oxenfurt at night. “It won’t take long,” he said when he left Jaskier and Ciri outside the walls, where they were finishing the final touches of inking the girl’s hair. “Don’t make trouble.” And then he was gone, leaving them to their own devices until morning. 

In larger towns, it’s safe for him to accept a commission and for her to perform, but in somewhere small like this, having a songstress and a witcher in such close quarters would be a signal for Nilfgaard scouts as to where he, and by extension Ciri, is currently. It’s safer to do nothing, as much as Jaskier loathes to be idle. Safer still to lie.

Realistically, she should have thought of this earlier. After all, Nilfgaard isn’t looking for a mother and daughter. 

The bath basins come in about the time that the woman promised, once Ciri’s dozing on her bed, wrapped tight under her travelling cloak to avoid dirtying the sheets. Without asking, the innkeep infused the water with dried lavender, and the soap she provided is lavender, too. Ciri is, clearly, thrilled, and barely stands still and dressed long enough to allow Jaskier to tie up her hair.

“I wish Geralt would let us carry scented soap,” she says, sighing, as she sinks into the water. “People do it all the time on the roads and don’t attract monsters.”

Sometimes, when she’s preoccupied with insisting Geralt teach her how to swing a sword or asking Jaskier to teach her the footwork to a folk dance, it’s easy to forget that Ciri is a princess. Then she’ll say something like this. Jaskier, blankly, says, “People who travel with scented soaps tend to have larger parties than three.”

Again, Ciri sighs, and sinks deeper into the water, though she doesn’t run the ink. “I know,” she says, then rolls her head to look at Jaskier. “Don’t you ever miss smelling nice when you’re with him?”

“Oh, inevitably,” she says, and forces away the painful thought of Yennefer brushing a comb scented with her own lilac oil through Jaskier’s wet hair. “That's the issue with men. They don’t care nearly as much as they should about personal hygiene. But as long as you’re with me, you’ll get this often enough. That I can promise.”

“I don’t look like your daughter,” Ciri says again, and adds, to Jaskier’s everlasting shame, “I’m taller than you.” 

Jaskier blushes. “That may be true,” she says, “but say anything with enough confidence and people will believe you. If you’d rather I not use the lie again, though, I won’t. People can choose what to assume on their own.” 

“No, it’s all right,” the girl says, and bites her cheek. “I don’t mind.”

“Oh, I—all right.” There’s a better answer to that, but Jaskier, as good as she is with words, doesn’t know it.

Shifting, looking away again, Ciri asks, “Is that why mostly everyone thinks you’re from Redania? Because you just let them assume?” 

“Yes.”

“Why?”

After a pause, where Jaskier considers how to explain the intersection between social and national politics to a girl raised in a castle, she finally says, “Fishermen’s daughters, regardless of how talented, don’t perform at princess’ betrothal feasts.”

“That’s stupid,” Ciri says, with all the self-righteous indignation befitting twelve-year-old girls of any social class. “Talent should be more important than who your parents are.” There’s another pause, and then she says, “I don’t mind it. The lie.” 

Somewhere in this situation has to be a joke about princesses and whores, but Jaskier just nods, and says, “Okay. Then hurry up, daughter o’ mine. The water’s getting cold.”

Within days of finding the man, Geralt explains to Ciri who Yennefer of Vengerberg is, and by necessity, Jaskier the Songstress. It’s not until nearly a week after he refuses to elaborate further on who either of them are, though, that Ciri raises the courage to ask, “Were you—I’m sorry, but. The manner in which you talk about them. Was one of them your, um. Lover?” 

He stiffens, ceasing mid-stir of the stew with his angled body so rigid he might shatter at the touch. “‘Lover?’” he repeats, which isn’t a denial.

_ Lover  _ seems...incorrect, but she can’t think of a better description. Clearly, witchers don’t have wives. “Yes,” she says, and sits straighter to look at him more directly. “You’re  _ wistful  _ when you say both their names. Who is it?”

Slowly, he also straightens, but he drops his gaze to focus on the fire, so his catlike eyes appear to flare. As she waits for his answer, a cool wind whistles through the evergreen needles above them tonelessly and an owl hoots somewhere in his distance. Finally, he says, “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does,” she says, frowning. “Yennefer is important. We need to find her. And Jaskier—I’ve heard of her, you know, and—”

“What?” When he looks to her, the movement of his head unnaturally quick, his eyes flash again. 

“Of course,” she says, mystified at his surprise. “I’ve never met her, but I’ve heard her music. I’ve heard that she’s from a noble family in Oxenfurt, and also from Temeria or maybe Aedirn, and that her mother was a rusalka, or that her father was an elf, and that she’s one of the most beautiful women in the Northern Kingdom, which is why—”

“I get the point,” he says through his teeth, and presses the heel of his palm to his forehead. More to himself than to her, he adds, quietly, “Yen’s from Aedirn,” as though a sorceress’ origins also impact what rumours people concoct about songstresses. 

Ciri suspects there’s something she’s missing.

More insistent now, she asks again, “Which one?” She stares at him, crossing her arms, daring him  _ not  _ to answer. What she doesn’t say is that she needs him to answer, needs him to prove that despite his eyes and the way he moves and the swords on his back and what people claim, he really is human. Her last few months taught her not to trust. Grandmother said he’s her destiny, but Grandmother is dead, and now Ciri is alone with a stranger who people say can’t feel emotions. She can’t trust him if that’s true. 

Then he sighs, and the tension leaks from him in what she thinks is resignation. “It’s complicated,” he says, and when she persists, clarifies with “both,” which doesn’t clarify anything at all. 

“Both?”

“It’s complicated.”

Her frown returns at its full force. “So one is—was—your wife,” she says, struggling to understand, because this is both what she wanted, and not, “and the other your paramour?”

Almost contritely, he says, “Witchers don’t take wives.”

“Then how—”

“They were also—” He stops, and shakes his head, focus drifting back to the flames and the stew. “It doesn’t matter.” 

That should be the end of it, but Ciri only manages to hold her tongue long enough to accept the gamey dinner she never would have eaten half a year earlier. Now it feels a lifetime ago, and now, in just a week, she finds she can’t stand silence in the dark. “When did you know?” she says, shattering the quiet. However confusing the concept of  _ three  _ people is, she can puzzle that out herself in the daylight. “For both of them. Either.”

The ensuing quiet lasts so long she prepares herself to repeat the question, but eventually, he huffs. “With the djinn, for Yen,” he says, which means love at first sight, and is far more romantic than she anticipated. There’s yet another everlasting pause before he continues, “Couple years later, for Jask, I think. In a fen.”

That’s the best she’ll get, and she knows it. For now, though, it proves enough. Maybe Yennefer of Vengerberg and Jaskier the Songstress are together still, mourning Geralt as a tragic lost love, and he can be happy again when they finally reunite. He isn’t happy now, Ciri knows, just like she isn’t happy, but maybe, eventually, if the circumstances are right, they can relearn how to be happy together. 

In Bremevoor fen country, Geralt forcibly realised that he wanted something with Jaskier that he could never have, but it isn’t until some time later, in a riverside village skirting the border of the Toussaint, that he realises he wants  _ her. _ That’s a different sort of want. It’s a want born of summertime breezes heavy with the smell of fermenting wine and slick olive oil drifting up from the valley, and clear sunlight emphasising the dust clinging to her borrowed men’s clothes. It’s born from the way the tucked shirt sags tight around her body in that sweet smelling breeze and the way the trousers cling to her hips. 

“Graviers make for unpleasant material,” she says, light and lazy, as she reclines against a moss-coated stone and plucks a new tune on her lute. “Geralt, if I were a proper bird, what would I be? No, don’t give me that look. This is very serious.” 

The breeze flutters their hair and clothes, and momentarily obscures his vision in white. That combination of wine and olive oil is heady, leaving him with an intoxicated rush fogging his thoughts. Upon her head she wears a self-made crown of honeysuckle and daisies, both exuding their own aroma, which doesn’t help clear his mind. She is beautiful, he thinks, which is treacherous and dirty. He doesn’t remember her age, other than she’s inevitability older than seventeen, but he knows the upturned slope of her nose reminds him of a button and her smile never hints that she’s hiding a secret tucked under her tongue. She is beautiful, and she is soft, and despite that, she’s not innocent in the way she deserves. 

“A woodpecker,” he says in an exhaled breath, because an answer like that is one she expects. Just as expectedly, she rolls her eyes in response. 

When she shifts her position, the borrowed shirt slides to the side, revealing the top swell of her breast and the line of dark freckles that mark it. Sunlight enshrines her like its hers to keep. He wants something with her that he can’t have, but he also wants  _ her.  _ He wants her in a bed, in the grass. He wants her naked without injury by her own volition. Because that’s important. Even if he doesn’t know the details, he knows that verifying that, at least, is paramount. 

But she’s young still, older than seventeen or not, and he has Yen, who has admittedly insinuated to wanting Jaskier in her bed as well. The girl—the woman—laughs, high and soft, and says, “Try again. We both know I’m a proper songbird.”

Fuck that. Jaskier is not a songbird, not is she a sunshine yellow weed. She’s as much a spirit as Yen is a sorceress, or he a nightmare. Still, he indulges her, because in the end, he always does. “A lark,” he says, because that’s true enough. A lark is a small thing, fragile, with a song that travels further than it should. 

She smiles mildly. “Good,” she says, and breathes. He looks without looking as her chest moves, up-down, up-down. It’s been years now since he’s had sex with a woman who isn’t a sorceress or a whore. Despite himself, he wonders about what the speed of her heartbeat would be. 

Two days later, when they’re a good way north and she’s back in her travelling dress, she finishes composing a folk song about a lark and a raven who find themselves a wolf. It’s not a love song, she tells him. He might even believe that, had life ever taught Jaskier how to lie. 

After three lifetimes, Yennefer learned to stop tracking passing years, if only to protect her own sanity. It occurs to her that she loves Jaskier when she stops midway through readying for her next journey one late summer morning at the thought that a full year has passed since she walked away from Geralt and the other woman at the entrance to a dragon’s lair, and that this detail is significant. This happens not long past dawn in Vengerberg, as she clutches in both hands the same thick coat she wore on that summit, standing alone in her bedroom, and by the morning that follows, she’s in Skellige with Jask at her side, the woman back where she belongs.

Neither of them mention Geralt.

What Yennefer likely should mention is the thought that lead her to Toussaint, to cornering Jask in the sunlit vineyard just to drag her into an unseasonable mountaintop blizzard. On the white sands of the secluded cove, Yennefer said, “Join me,” and, “I always return.” Now, on the rocky shore of the blue-grey loch under this grey grey sky, she should say, “I love you,” but the words are too mangled in her throat to come to fruition.

“Annarietta may call for my death after this,” Jaskier says, turned partly away from Yennefer as she flicks her rest, sending a stone skipping across the loch. It lasts four jumps before dropping into the water, but the ripples each strike leaves in the mirror-like surface continue to spread at a glacial pace, growing. Sighing, Jaskier says, “Never being allowed into Beauclair again is a shame. The sacrifices I make for you, Yen.”

Her tone is teasing, but Yennefer hears the underlining message regardless.  _ I left a life for you,  _ Jaskier is not saying.  _ Don’t make me regret it. _

“You don’t even drink their wine,” Yennefer says, raising a brow, to which Jask laughs, and answers, “That’s true.”

Humans are delicate and breakable and so quick to die. For Yennefer, the passage of time matters little; she needed distance to come to terms with what happened at the mouth of the dragon’s lair, and hadn’t considered  _ humanity  _ as a constraining factor for how long she had to do that. But she’d forgotten that Jaskier doesn’t have fate’s noose wrapped around her neck, yanking her towards specific people and places and things, and a very bad habit of simply accepting her employers’ whims without fuss. Neither magic nor destiny tethered them together, but Yennefer’s own freely made decisions. She should have considered that sooner.

As Jaskier leans down to retrieve another flat stone from the space near her feet, Yennefer reaches out and wraps a hand around her elbow. The other woman freezes, straightens, and allows her to turn her around. “I won’t do this again,” she says, and swears it, because that’s as close to  _ I love you _ as she can manage.

Jaskier’s smile has the warmth of the Toussaint summer, and when she kisses Yennefer, that smile doesn’t fade. Their years together are finite, confined to a single lifetime amongst her many. Just for that, for this one shared lifetime, she can track the days, the hours—the space between heartbeats, and the number of sunsets that pass when they’re apart.

Jaskier knows that she will die young, and she will die alone. 

Once, when she was twenty-five, just three days after she met Priscilla at the festival in Oxenfurt, the woman passed her a glass of wine she didn’t drink and asked, “Where will life take you in ten years, do you imagine?” and Jaskier, without thinking, answered, “To the grave, I reckon.”

Though Priscilla laughed, Jaskier meant it. She falls in and out of the beds of a sorceress and a witcher; she flirts with threats to her personal safety; she disregards well-meaning warnings; she runs her mouth. Too often Yen and Geralt are there to piece her back together when she breaks. This is how she knows that when she dies, she will be alone, and it will be no one’s fault but her own. 

Which is why she refuses to have  _ today  _ be the one to mark her untimely end.

Geralt presses his forehead to hers, his large hand warm on the back of her neck, positioning her in such a way that can’t see the rest of her body. “You’re safe,” he says. Keeps saying it, like a litany. She doesn’t know who he’s trying to reassure. “Breathe.”

Breathing is as difficult in coming to her now as thinking. Her insides are tatters, no better or worse than the state of her exterior. Dislocated ribs, she thinks Yen said. The feeling of them slotting back into place along her spine, guided by her light touch, would leave Jaskier screaming, if she remembered how to make a sound.

Neither Geralt nor Yen are going to hurt her. The level Jaskier knows this is on is deeper than objective, but instinctive. She can’t place exactly how long it’s been since she first saw the black-fletched arrow embed in Kasztan’s neck, or had the knife press against her own, but it hasn’t been long enough to strip her of basic instincts. She wants to scream under Yen’s healing touch, but doesn’t. She wants to say sorry or maybe thank you, but can’t find the words. She wants to collapse. Cry. _Stop._

Instead, she breathes. 

She can’t recall entirely how she managed to find her way back to Kaer Moren, nor does she have any particular desire to gain those memories back. What she knows is that when she dies, she refuses to allow the cause to be two soldiers throwing her on her back just five miles from safety.

“We should get you clean,” Yen says, voice barely above a murmur, so low it might as well be one of Jaskier’s own thoughts. She doesn’t nod, but slides forward as Geralt weakens his grip, and pillows her head in the crook of his neck. Yen is still speaking, but not to her. “Get her to the springs. I’m going to go check that Ciri won’t wander off.” 

They’re in one of the downstairs rooms, or at least Jaskier thinks. He slips an arm around her shoulders and another under her knees, then stands. “Bring clothes” is all he says. 

Within seven years or so, Jaskier will probably be dead, but she couldn’t have that be here, now. She remembers, in a sudden flash, fourteen years early, when a water spirit with slippery cold skin and eyes like trout gripped her wrist with a death vice and hissed, “Fall, and no one will find you.”

This is Jaskier, falling. No one found her, but she found them, and what difference that makes is inconsequential. 

**Author's Note:**

> Depending on my workload, there might be one more. I'm debating on doing a weird many years post this reincarnation AU? I'm willing to take thoughts.


End file.
